Collingwood's New Leviathan and classical elite theory

Collingwood’s New Leviathan and classical elite theory Christopher Fear C.Fear@hull.ac.uk ABSTRACT R. G. Collingwood’s New Leviathan (1942) presents an account of two ‘dialectical’ political processes that are ongoing in any body politic. Existing scholarship has already covered the first: a dialectic between a ‘social’ and a ‘non-social’ element, which Collingwood identifies in Hobbes.1 This study elucidates the second: a dialectic between Liberals and Conservatives, which regulates the ‘percolation’ of liberty and the rate of ‘recruitment’ into what Collingwood calls ‘the ruling class’. The details of this second dialectic are to be found not in Hobbes, but in classical elite theory, especially in the work of Vilfredo Pareto and Gaetano Mosca, who have not previously been discussed in relation to Collingwood. KEYWORDS R. G. Collingwood; Gaetano Mosca; Vilfredo Pareto; elites; ruling class; aristocracy. 1. INTRODUCTION R. G. Collingwood’s The New Leviathan: or, Man, Society, Civilization and Barbarism (1941)2 is his magnum opus of political philosophy. But even Collingwood’s admirers have long suspected that it is not a reliable record of their man’s best political thought.3 T. M. Knox’s view that Collingwood’s later work is deficient has been generally rejected,4 but it has cast a long shadow. A common view is that the first two parts of the book, which deal with ‘man’ and ‘society’, are stronger than the third and fourth parts, which deal with ‘civilization’ and ‘barbarism’. As James Connelly and Peter Johnson have recently detailed, parts III and IV, which comprise just over a quarter of the book, were written more hastily, and the process affected by Collingwood’s fragile health.5 The New Leviathan has also been widely interpreted as merely a pragmatic contribution to 1. Robin Douglass, ‘Leviathans Old and New: What Collingwood saw in Hobbes’, History of European Ideas 41, no. 4 (2015), 527–43. 2. R. G. Collingwood, The New Leviathan: or Man, Society, Civilization and Barbarism [1942] (Oxford: Clarendon, 1999). 3. See Peter Nicholson, ‘Collingwood’s New Leviathan then and now’, Collingwood Studies 1 (1994), 163–80, 174– 6. 4. See Guido Vanheeswijk, ‘Collingwood’s “Reformed Metaphysics” and the Radical Conversion Hypothesis’, Journal of the History of Philosophy 52, 3 (2014), 577–600. 5. The fourth part, Collingwood warns in a 1941 letter, may contain what he refers to as ‘traces of battiness’, since it was written in the aftermath of a stroke. See James Connelly and Peter Johnson, ‘The composition of R. G. Collingwood’s The New Leviathan’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy (2018), 9–10. DOI: 10.1080/09608788.2018.1494540. the Allied war effort.6 Peter Nicholson sees it as a ‘mere polemical tract’.7 But this rather belittles Collingwood’s project and achievement. The New Leviathan is a highly ambitious work: drawing on two decades’ worth of preparatory lectures and notes, it synthesises philosophy, history, and political commentary. Collingwood asks that the result be read not simply as a timely tract, but as a normal academic work, ‘an attempt to bring the Leviathan up to date, in the light of the advances made since it was written, in history, psychology, and anthropology’.8 Interpreted as such, it earned the praise of early readers including H. H. Price, W. D. Ross, and J. L. Austin.9 Today The New Leviathan is beginning to be recognized as a serious achievement by political theorists beyond the circle of Collingwood specialists. Robin Douglass has furnished the History of European Ideas with a close study of The New Leviathan, focusing on Collingwood’s reading of Hobbes—which is, he observes, ‘strikingly original’.10 This originality is due in part to Collingwood’s recognition that, for Hobbes, ‘a body politic is a dialectical thing’.11 Collingwood’s understanding of ‘dialectic’ follows, as Douglass explains, a distinction found in Plato’s Meno between two types of discussion: ‘eristic’ and ‘dialectic’.12 In ‘eristic’ discussion, ‘each party tries to show that he was right and the other wrong’; whereas in ‘dialectical’ discussion ‘you aim at showing that your own view is one with which your opponent really agrees’.13 Douglass also outlines the dialectic that Collingwood posits in a body politic between a negative element of ‘non-sociality’ and a positive element of ‘sociality’. According to Collingwood, this is what Hobbes means by ‘nature’ and ‘commonwealth’,14 and a further achievement, as Collingwood reads him, is the recognition that this dialectic can go either way.15 There is nothing in Douglass’s account that I would wish to correct. But there is a second political dialectic in The New Leviathan which he does not discuss—and he has no need to, because Collingwood does not find it in Hobbes. This second dialectic explains the correct relationship between the Liberal and Conservative parties that dominated the Westminster 6. Rik Peters, History as Thought and Action: The Philosophies of Croce, Gentile, de Ruggiero and Collingwood (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2013), 311, 394, 396; Nicholson, ‘Collingwood’s New Leviathan’, 170. See also David Boucher, ‘The Principles of History and the cosmology conclusion to The Idea of Nature’, Collingwood Studies 2 (1995), 140–74. 7. Nicholson, ‘Collingwood’s New Leviathan’, 175. Collingwood never says that that is what The New Leviathan is primarily for, and he omits from the preface an analogy in the draft that would have emphasised the ‘practical’ purpose of the book. See R. G. Collingwood, Essays in Political Philosophy, ed. David Boucher (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 227. 8. Collingwood, New Leviathan, lx–lxi. For more detailed discussions of the relation between the two Leviathans see David Boucher, The Social and Political Thought of R. G. Collingwood (Cambridge University Press, 1989), 63– 109; David Boucher and Andrew Vincent, British Idealism and Political Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), 185; Nicholson, ‘Collingwood’s New Leviathan’; Gary Browning, ‘New Leviathans for old’, Collingwood Studies 2 (1995), 89–106, esp. 101–5; and Douglass, ‘Leviathans Old and New’. 9. See Connelly and Johnson, ‘The composition of R. G. Collingwood’s The New Leviathan’, 10–11. 10. See Douglass, ‘Leviathans Old and New’, 529. 11. Collingwood, New Leviathan, 24.68. See Douglass, ‘Leviathans Old and New’, 538. 12. See Plato, Meno, in John M. Cooper (ed.), Complete Works (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett, 1997), 875 (75 c–d). 13. Collingwood, New Leviathan, 24.57–9. 14. See Douglass, ‘Leviathans Old and New’, 538–9. 15. See Douglass, ‘Leviathans Old and New’, 539. system until 1922,16 and the timeless principles of democracy and aristocracy that, as Collingwood sees it, the parties embody respectively. Scholarly attention to this second of The New Leviathan’s political dialectics, and to what it claims about the political role of Conservatives and ‘aristocracy’, has been very fleeting.17 It is perhaps a natural lacuna, since Collingwood tells us in his Autobiography that his attitude towards politics ‘had always been what in England is called democratic and on the Continent liberal’.18 Specialists have therefore discussed amply Collingwood’s reception and reformulation of a liberal and democratic tradition of political thought, and have always acknowledged the largely Italian flavour of Collingwood’s brand of idealism, which draws especially on Benedetto Croce, Giovanni Gentile, and Guido de Ruggiero.19 It is not my intention here to reclassify Collingwood’s political thought or to overturn any of this20—though I have explained elsewhere how such a dialectical view of politics might be useful to today’s studies of conservatism.21 Collingwood does not think of himself as a Conservative, though it is interesting to note that he wrote approvingly of the outcome of the 1931 general election, at which Stanley Baldwin’s Conservatives gained 210 seats on a swing of 16.9% in their favour: it’s very comforting to see that the ‘working’ man and ‘working’ woman will vote against the people who pose as their friends and for the people who promise them lower doles, higher prices, and solvency. We shall see whether the promises are redeemed; but if a country gets the government it deserves, this electorate ought to get a good one.22 16. It seems initially strange that Collingwood does not name the Labour party, since The New Leviathan is a thoroughly reconciliatory text from the parliamentary point of view, and by 1941 Labour was the second largest part of the National Government, with Labour MPs outnumbering those of the combined Liberal parties in the House of Commons three to one. Noel O’Sullivan notes that this omission was quite deliberate, but identifies it all the same as a weakness: ‘The development of political consciousness in the working class … was one phenomenon which Collingwood found impossible to accommodate within his political theory’. N. K. O’Sullivan, ‘Irrationalism in Politics: A Critique of R. G. Collingwood’s New Leviathan’, Political Studies 20, 2 (1972), 141–51, 147–8. Collingwood is, I think, allowing readers to think of Labour as another, newer, representative of ‘democracy’, rather than of non-dialectical class war. For some of Collingwood’s criticisms of Marx and socialism, see New Leviathan, 12.95, 19.82–3, 25.33, 33.77–80, 37.58. See also Collingwood, Essays in Political Philosophy, 181–4; and Peter Johnson, A Philosopher and Appeasement: R. G. Collingwood and the Second World War: A Philosopher at War Volume 2 (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2013), 142. 17. Existing discussions of this political dialectic specifically are limited to those of David Boucher, in Social and Political Thought, 163–6; in Collingwood, Essays in Political Philosophy, 14–15; in Collingwood, New Leviathan, xliv– xlv; and in R. G. Collingwood, An Autobiography and Other Writings [1939] (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 395. 18. Collingwood, Autobiography, 153. See also Collingwood’s preface to Guido de Ruggiero, History of European Liberalism, trans. R. G. Collingwood (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927), vii. David Boucher has dealt thoroughly with the view of some of Collingwood’s contemporaries that he had ‘converted to Marxism, or had become a Communist sympathizer’. See Boucher in Collingwood, Essays in Political Philosophy), 7–30. 19. See Boucher, Social and Political Thought, 15–21. See also Peters, History as Thought and Action. 20. Indeed the main task for scholars of Collingwood’s politics has been to emphasise his liberalism against the view that ‘his political views [before the war] had swung sharply to the left’. See Boucher in Collingwood, Essays in Political Philosophy, 7. See also Johnson, A Philosopher and Appeasement, 142. 21. [Details removed for anonymity of peer review]. 22. R. G. Collingwood to W. G. Collingwood, 29 October 1931, in James Connelly, Peter Johnson, and Stephen Leach, R. G. Collingwood: A Research Companion (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 40, 110. But The New Leviathan is not a Conservative treatise. The fact is that Collingwood has to offer some sort of defence of the Conservative party, because part of the book’s purpose of is to defend the ‘talking-shop at Westminster’ against the one-party, non-dialectical politics of Fascism.23 All the same, focusing upon this second dialectic as a serious contribution to political philosophy, rather than as a timely and pragmatic political myth, opens up hitherto underexplored aspects of Collingwood’s thought. First we see how thoroughly he revises a dialectic that has in fact been long recognized in Western political thought. And second, we discover striking parallels with the work of two further Italian authors who have not been discussed before in relation to Collingwood: Vilfredo Pareto and Gaetano Mosca, the two leading figures of what has since been called ‘classical elite theory’.24 (I will continue to use the term for convenience.) 2. COLLINGWOOD’S SECOND DIALECTIC OF POLITICS For Collingwood, the difference between the Liberal and Conservative parties concerns what he calls ‘the percolation of liberty throughout every part of the body politic’.25 It is the avowed aim of Liberals to ‘hasten’ that process, and the avowed aim of Conservatives to ‘retard’ it.26 However the relationship is not eristical, but dialectical, owing to two important points of agreement. First, ‘Both [parties] held it as an axiom that the process of percolation must go on’.27 And second, both parties recognize that there exists an ‘optimum velocity’ for this process; that ‘if it went too fast, and equally if it went too slow, the whole political life of the country would suffer’.28 For Collingwood, this process of percolating liberty operates by ‘recruiting’ people into what he calls the ‘ruling class’ from the ‘ruled’ class,29 or ‘non-social community’.30 That fact that a body politic is ‘divided into a ruling class and a ruled class’ Collingwood calls ‘the first law of politics’.31 There are three of these ‘laws’: the second is that ‘the barrier between the two classes is permeable in an upward sense’.32 Collingwood does not provide a very detailed explanation of why these two processes, percolating liberty and recruiting into the ruling class, are in fact the same process. The logic seems to be that the liberty of an individual is furthered in and through the social liberties and duties that are bestowed by his being recruited into a social position that involves ‘ruling’ in 23. Collingwood, New Leviathan, 28.2. 24. Jan Pakulski includes Robert Michels in the ‘classical elite theoretical camp’. (Collingwood’s work predates Michels’.) See Pakulski, ‘The Weberian Foundations of Modern Elite Theory and Democratic Elitism’, Historical Social Research/Historische Sozialforschung 37, 1 (139), Elite Foundations of Social Theory and Politics (2012), 38–56, 40. 25. Collingwood, New Leviathan, 27.8. 26. Collingwood, New Leviathan, 27.8. 27. Collingwood, New Leviathan, 27.8. 28. Collingwood, New Leviathan, 27.81. 29. Collingwood, New Leviathan, 25.11–19. 30. Collingwood, New Leviathan, 20.32. See David Boucher’s discussion of why Collingwood should therefore be seen as a theorist in the ‘politics of recognition’ tradition: David Boucher, ‘Tocqueville, Collingwood, history and extending the moral community’, British Journal of Politics and International Relations 2, 3 (2000), 326–51, 336– 7. 31. Collingwood, New Leviathan, 25.7. For Collingwood’s definition of ‘ruling’, see New Leviathan, 20.35. 32. Collingwood, New Leviathan, 25.8. some sense. But this equation of the percolation of liberty and the recruitment of people from the non-social community is a little awkward, since it seems to imply that the only people who are free in a body politic are the members of its ruling class, while being ‘ruled’ means being unfree. The awkwardness is mitigated by Collingwood’s perhaps deliberate imprecision about what exactly the ‘ruling class’ is. It does not seem to mean ‘central government’ or any specific institutions. It is also somewhat eased by Collingwood’s claim that freedom is a matter of degree.33 People are not simply free or unfree; rather, from less free they grow freer as they are made increasingly ‘mentally adult’,34 and are ‘assimilated in psychological character’ to their rulers.35 Accordingly, they are able to rule and be ruled by consent (or ‘authority’) rather than by force.36 But as well as being liberating for individuals, this process of recruitment is also necessary for the maintenance of the ‘ruling class’. Comprising mortal beings, the ruling class must be perpetually ‘replenished’, or it will grow too small or too weak to solve new political problems. The perpetual replenishment of the ruling class is therefore ‘the process which is the life of the body politic’.37 Collingwood does not explain how and when the decision to recruit is made, or by whom, since such particulars will vary. But the ruling class—any ruling class—always faces the question of how quickly it must replenish itself in order to become or remain as ‘strong’ as possible.38 And to this question, Collingwood says, two answers are always given: Democracy answers: “By enlarging it [the ruling class] so far as is possible. By recruiting into it, to discharge one or other function, every member of the ruled class who may constitute an addition to its strength.” Aristocracy answers: “By restricting it so far as is needful. By excluding from its membership everyone who does not or would not increase its strength.”39 These terms, ‘democracy’ and ‘aristocracy’, are being deployed in rather an idiosyncratic way. They do not denote the relative size of the sovereign power, or ‘citizen-body’, as they do for Aristotle,40 but instead stand for two different principles of ongoing recruitment into it. So long as both principles are allowed to influence the rate of percolation and recruitment, by means of a relationship that is dialectical rather than eristical, that rate will not exceed ‘optimum velocity’.41 Collingwood intends this democratic–aristocratic dialectic as universal, and he traces it the through Western political history, from ancient Greece and Rome, through the Middle Ages, the English Civil Wars, and the American and French Revolutions, to ‘the arch-Fascists and 33. Collingwood, New Leviathan, 20.62, 21.8, 25.41. 34. Collingwood, New Leviathan, 20.23. 35. Collingwood, New Leviathan, 27.74. 36. Collingwood, New Leviathan, 20.45–8. 37. Collingwood, New Leviathan, 26.16. 38. Collingwood, New Leviathan, 26.13. 39. Collingwood, New Leviathan, 26.14–15. This chapter was probably complete by January 1941 (see Connelly and Johnson, ‘The composition of R. G. Collingwood’s The New Leviathan’, 7). It is interesting that Collingwood considers Part II of The New Leviathan to be the part that ‘covers what is called social and political theory’, while Part III, in which this discussion falls, ‘is about Civilization’. See Connelly and Johnson, ‘The composition of R. G. Collingwood’s The New Leviathan’, 9. 40. Aristotle, The Politics, trans. T. A. Sinclair, ed. Trevor J. Saunders (London: Penguin, 1992), 189–90 (III, vii). 41. Collingwood, New Leviathan, 26.19, 27.89. arch-Nazis of to-day’.42 Each ‘revolution’ was indeed democratic, Collingwood says, but each was also aristocratic. In England, ‘democracy’ and ‘aristocracy’ are embedded in the Liberal and Conservative parties respectively. Liberals, as ‘democrats’, ensure that the rate of recruitment does not fall below the ‘optimum velocity’, while Conservatives, as ‘aristocrats’, ensure that the optimum velocity is not exceeded. For Collingwood it is true, then, that serving the interests of ‘aristocracy’ is a Conservative principle, as critics have often said. But of course by ‘aristocracy’ Collingwood does not mean what Aristotle means, and he certainly does not mean by ‘aristocracy’ the sort of social class that Paine sought to excoriate in his Rights of Man.43 If either principle ceased to exert its force, Collingwood warns, ‘the whole political life of the country would suffer’.44 It is because both parties are allowed to realize their objectives, and neither is allowed to defeat the other once and for all, that the ‘optimum velocity’ of percolation is maintained. Collingwood doubts that the parties were ever fully aware of their proper dialectical function.45 But on occasion, he adds, they agreed on their joint task so completely that ‘one party could steal the other’s thunder’, as happened when Disraeli’s 1867 Reform Bill ‘dished the Whigs’.46 Understanding the dialectical rather than eristical nature of the two-party system is, for Collingwood, indispensable, and he places the blame squarely upon the Liberals for their own demise: they ‘did not understand the dialectic of English politics’.47 3. DE RUGGIERO’S DIALECTIC OF LIBERALISM Although Collingwood barely points it out,48 there is a long history in Western political thought of the notion that there should be a complementary relationship between the characters, factions, or principles of something like innovation and something like conservation—energy and moderation, progress and tradition, novelty and order, action and reaction, and so on—a mysterious partnership that maintains something like ‘peace’, ‘harmony’, or freedom. We find it in Plato, in Machiavelli, in Burke, Tocqueville, Coleridge, and in Mill—and even among some twentieth-century politicians themselves.49 Coleridge’s formulation bears an extra 42. Collingwood, New Leviathan, 26.4–96. 43. Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, Common Sense, and Other Political Writings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 133. 44. Collingwood, New Leviathan, 27.81. 45. Collingwood, New Leviathan, 27.9. 46. Collingwood, New Leviathan, 27.83. Collingwood’s namedrop may not be entirely coincidental. There is some correspondence here with Disraeli’s thought. For Disraeli as for Collingwood, forms of government must be suited to the people they are applied to; and Conservatives should legislate to slow the rate of liberty when, as in the nineteenth century, market forces seemed to generate the very rapid freedom of industrial capitalists. See Anthony Quinton, The politics of imperfection: the religious and secular traditions of conservative thought in England from Hooker to Oakeshott (London: Faber, 1978), 80–2. 47. Collingwood, New Leviathan, 27.97. 48. Collingwood, New Leviathan, 27.5. 49. Plato, Statesman, in J. Cooper (ed.), Plato: Complete Works (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), 294–358, 357 (311a– b). Niccolò Machiavelli, The Discourses [c. 1517], ed. Bernard Crick (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), 113 (1.4). Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France [1790] (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 157–8, 169. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, On the Constitution of Church and State According to the Idea of Each [1830] (London: Dent, 1972), 16–18. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America and Two Essays on America [vol. 1 1835, vol. 2 1840] (London: Penguin, 2003), 204, 207–9. R. P. Anschutz, The Philosophy of J. S. Mill (Oxford: Clarendon, 1952), 61– 77. Hugh Cecil, Conservatism (London: Williams & Norgate, 1912), 13, 17–18. similarity to Collingwood’s, in that it contains a distinction between ‘contrary’ and ‘opposite powers’ that echoes the Platonic distinction favoured by Collingwood between eristic and dialectic: unlike ‘contrary’ powers, Coleridge thinks, ‘opposite’ powers ‘tend to union’ and, in the specific case of ‘permanence’ and ‘progressiveness’, ‘so far from being contrary interests … [they] suppose and require each other’.50 A very similar dialectic is also narrated in Guido de Ruggiero’s History of European Liberalism, which was first published in English in 1927. De Ruggiero’s formulation is worth extra attention, as Collingwood was its translator—and not a disinterested one. He knew de Ruggiero personally,51 and in a letter of 1926 had written that ‘The political principles expounded and implied [in de Ruggiero’s History] are at every point my own, and expressed with a justness and completeness that leave me nothing to do but express my complete agreement’.52 The dialectic that de Ruggiero describes is somewhat similar to that which Collingwood would later outline in The New Leviathan. It is a dialectic, de Ruggiero writes, ‘of continuity and antithesis’,53 in which the ‘ideal value of the principle which lies at the root of Conservatism … nourishes the dialectical antithesis of the Liberal thesis’.54 It operates by ‘the alternate rule of parties’,55 uniting ‘the principle of conservation with that of progress, Radical initiative with historical tradition’,56 and effecting ‘a higher synthesis of identity and difference, unity and multiplicity’, which depends upon ‘the dialectical character of the opposition between them’.57 Like Collingwood’s, this dialectic is also about propagating freedom: together the two forces ‘are aiming at a democracy of free men: at instilling a sense of autonomy into the masses, fostering a spirit of spontaneous association and co-operation’.58 And from this perspective, de Ruggiero writes, ‘the development of the struggle between Conservatives and Liberals, and their alternation in power, represent not an alternation of freedom and unfreedom, light and darkness, but the rhythm of an uninterrupted movement’.59 All this seems familiar to readers of The New Leviathan, though of course de Ruggiero’s expression is more elaborate than we find among the punchy decimalized assertions of Collingwood’s ‘late style’. However, it is not at all the case that Collingwood’s revisions of de Ruggiero’s dialectic are merely stylistic. Upon closer inspection, de Ruggiero’s dialectic is not actually between liberalism and conservatism, and it is not between democracy and aristocracy either. Rather, it is between democracy on the one side and liberalism on the other. ‘Democracy’ for de Ruggiero means the political force, against the status quo, of popular equality and 50. Coleridge, Church and State, 16–17 n. 51. See Peters, History as Thought and Action, 3. 52. Collingwood to Kenneth Sisam, 18 November 1926, in Connelly, Johnson, and Leach, Research Companion, 32. 53. De Ruggiero, History of European Liberalism, 370. 54. De Ruggiero, History of European Liberalism, 362. 55. De Ruggiero, History of European Liberalism, 363. 56. De Ruggiero, History of European Liberalism, 362. 57. This higher synthesis de Ruggiero calls ‘Liberal democracy’. See de Ruggiero, History of European Liberalism, 379. 58. De Ruggiero, History of European Liberalism, 379. 59. De Ruggiero, History of European Liberalism, 361. unity/uniformity.60 ‘Liberalism’ on the other hand is the force, also against the status quo, for personal liberties,61 the ‘free play of individual forces’, and of ‘leaving men so far as possible to act for themselves’.62 Both democracy and liberty, in de Ruggiero’s understanding, are principles of self-government, but for different entities: democracy is the self-government of the people, liberalism the self-government of individual persons. Collingwood’s dialectic is significantly different in that, as we have seen, it regulates the percolation of liberty by the concrete process of recruiting into the ruling class, and this forms no part of de Ruggiero’s explanation. Collingwood therefore remodels ‘democracy’ as a recruitment principle, and aligns it with the Liberal party; and, on the other side, introduces ‘aristocracy’ as a different but equally necessary recruitment principle, and offers it as the political function of Conservatives. For de Ruggiero, both democracy and liberalism, when active, work against ‘passive mechanism and the conservatism of routine’.63 Conservatism plays no consistent dialectical role in de Ruggiero’s dialectic; it is simply resistance to either ‘democracy’ or ‘liberalism’. Collingwood’s version, then, contains a significant revision of the account with which he had once wished to express his ‘complete agreement’: namely the mechanism of recruitment, and the dialectical function of restricting access to the ruling class. 4. CLASSICAL ELITE THEORY Collingwood’s innovation is to revise an old theory of something like a liberal–conservative dialectic such that it is transformed it into an account of how power and freedom are bestowed—and indeed must be bestowed. That is to say, rather than using the old dialectic to explain an abstract and general state of something like peace, harmony, or general freedom, Collingwood uses it to explain the process by which power is distributed, restricted, and perpetually diffused in a heterogeneous and evolving body politic. He achieves this by accommodating into the structure of The New Leviathan a certain theory of the ruling class: what it is, how it rules, how it replenishes itself, and the danger of excessively restricted access to it. I do not wish to suggest that Collingwood cannot have made these modifications to the old liberal–conservative dialectic without any other authors’ work in mind. But on each of these points Collingwood’s explanation evinces a good deal of agreement with classical elite theory: with Pareto’s Les systèmes socialistes (1902) and Trattato di sociologia generale (1916), and especially with Gaetano Mosca’s Elementi di scienza politica (first published 1896, second edition 1923).64 The English translations of these latter two, Pareto’s The Mind and Society and Mosca’s The Ruling Class, appeared in 1935 and 1939 respectively. The New Leviathan was begun in the autumn of 1939,65 and the sections discussed here were probably complete by January 1941.66 Both translations were edited by Arthur Livingston (1883–1944) and published by McGraw-Hill of New York. Like Collingwood, Livingston had devoted much of his career to introducing Italian 60. De Ruggiero, History of European Liberalism, 370. 61. These are understood as positive and negative liberties. See de Ruggiero, History of European Liberalism, 350– 1. 62. De Ruggiero, History of European Liberalism, 359. 63. De Ruggiero, History of European Liberalism, 436. 64. Both first English editions were edited by Arthur Livingston, who discusses parallels between the two in his introduction to Gaetano Mosca, The Ruling Class: Elementi di Scienza Politica, ed. Arthur Livingston, trans. Hannah D. Kahn (New York, Toronto, London: McGraw-Hill, 1939), xxxvi–xxxix, xli. 65. See Connelly and Johnson, ‘The composition of R. G. Collingwood’s The New Leviathan’, 4. 66. See Connelly and Johnson, ‘The composition of R. G. Collingwood’s The New Leviathan’, 7. writers to Anglophone readers. He was a published translator of Croce, and an anti-Fascist corresponding with other anti-Fascists in Italy and in exile. There is no hard evidence that Collingwood knew anything of Livingston, and Collingwood would anyway not have had to wait for English translations, since he read Italian and French very proficiently. Indeed, Pareto’s Les systèmes socialistes and Trattato di sociologia generale, and Mosca’s Elementi di Scienza Politica all appear in the bibliography of Collingwood’s translation of The History of European Liberalism.67 This of course does not demonstrate either that he had knowledge of their contents. But some knowledge of Mosca is suggested in private correspondence. In 1935 Humphrey Milford, head of Oxford University Press’s London operations, had forwarded to Collingwood a memorandum from OUP’s New York office containing some sort of proposition in relation to ‘the work of Gaetano Mosca’, and asking for Collingwood’s opinion on this proposition. ‘You no doubt know all about Mosca’, Milford explains.68 Collingwood seems to have been interested, and three days later Milford writes again: ‘Thanks very much. If the MS. [manuscript] comes over here, I will ask you to look at it, if you will’.69 The manuscript is presumably Livingston’s. These connections are however rather circumstantial, and it would be quite premature to conclude that Collingwood must have read the classical elite theorists, let alone that traces of them are conclusively demonstrable in The New Leviathan, where neither Pareto nor Mosca is named.70 The most we can say, I think, is that it seems unlikely that Collingwood would have completely missed the appearance of the English translations,71 and that it may be that in The New Leviathan he is engaging in some way with classical elite theory. And anyway, beyond those points that serve to connect Collingwood’s own longstanding notions of liberalism and civilization with the more concrete claims he wants to make about the dialectical nature of the Westminster system, there are many more differences between his general social, political, and historical thought and that of the two Italians than there are similarities. Nevertheless it is my intention in what remains to provide an overview of these similarities. The relevant points concern specifically (1) the nature of the ruling class; (2) how it rules; (3) its renovation and the meaning of ‘democracy’, and (4) the meaning of ‘aristocracy’ and the political danger of class isolation. 4.1 The ruling class The first point of agreement is obvious from even a superficial reading. For Collingwood, as for Pareto and Mosca, there is in all societies an organized ruling minority which directs or controls the less organized majority.72 As we have already seen, Collingwood makes the universal existence of a ‘ruling class’ and a ‘ruled class’ his ‘first law of politics’.73 67. See de Ruggiero, History of European Liberalism, 463. 68. Humphrey Milford to R. G. Collingwood, 28 May 1935, Oxford University Press archive. 69. Humphrey Milford to R. G. Collingwood, 31 May 1935, Oxford University Press archive. 70. This fact is however unremarkable. Collingwood was never much of a name-dropper, and would have had good reasons not to advertise the recent history of this sort of argument. See James H. Meisel’s introduction to James H. Meisel (ed.), Pareto and Mosca (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1965), 17–18. 71. The Ruling Class was also discussed in The Review of Politics that year. See Fritz Morstein Marx, ‘The Bureaucratic State: Some Remarks on Gaetano Mosca’s Ruling Class’, The Review of Politics 1, 4 (Oct., 1939), 457–72. 72. Vilfredo Pareto, Mind and Society, ed. and trans. Arthur Livingston, 4 vols (London: Cape, 1939), 2047. 73. Collingwood, New Leviathan, 25.7. Collingwood presented his three laws of politics as a Hobhouse Memorial Lecture while writing The New Leviathan. His poor health prevented him from delivering the lecture in person. See Collingwood, Essays in Political Philosophy, 207–223. Though Pareto is usually credited with pioneering the theory of ‘governing élites’ (his preferred term),74 there has been some debate about whether Mosca’s formulation is the earlier, and partly the source of the other’s.75 There is, Mosca explains, ‘a class that rules and a class that is ruled. The first class, always the less numerous, performs all political functions, monopolizes power and enjoys the advantages that power brings, whereas the second, the more numerous class, is directed and controlled by the first’.76 This is one of the ‘constant facts and tendencies that are to be found in all political organisms … from societies that are very meagrely developed and have barely attained the dawnings of civilization, down to the most advanced and powerful societies’.77 Mosca does not consider this to be a remarkable or original discovery. He thinks he is simply applying Taine’s historical method to societies in general, recognizes formulations of the same theory in Machiavelli and Saint-Simon,78 and thinks that the existence of ‘political’ or ‘ruling’ classes is ‘so obvious that it is apparent to the most casual eye’.79 At any rate, it is Mosca’s term, ‘ruling class’, rather than Pareto’s ‘governing élite’, that we also find in Collingwood’s formulation.80 In relation to The New Leviathan, it is especially interesting that the basic claim of classical elite theory is actually a departure from Hobbes, whom of course Collingwood is all the time claiming as his model. Mosca details two widespread ‘habits’ of political analysis that, he thinks, distort the true nature of politics. The first is the assumption that in every political organism ‘there is one individual who is chief among the leaders of the ruling class as a whole and stands, as we say, at the helm of state’.81 But, Mosca points out, it is hard to imagine how ‘all men would be directly subject to a single person without relationships of superiority or subordination’.82 Such an individual… would certainly not be able to govern without the support of a numerous class to enforce respect for his orders and to have them carried out … he certainly cannot be at odds with the class as a whole or do away with it. Even if that were possible, he would at once be forced to create another class, without the support of which action on his part would be completely paralyzed.83 Collingwood does not provide as much detail on the internal structure of this class as Pareto or Mosca—or in fact Weber.84 But the basic notion is nevertheless there in The New Leviathan, 74. Pareto, Mind and Society, 2031–2. 75. See Meisel, Pareto and Mosca, 14–16. 76. Mosca, Ruling Class, 50. 77. Mosca, Ruling Class, 50. 78. Mosca, Ruling Class, 329. 79. Mosca, Ruling Class, 50. 80. One of Pareto’s formulations (Mind and Society, 2047), however, runs as follows: ‘The least we can do is to divide society into two strata: a higher stratum, which usually contains the rulers, and a lower stratum, which usually contains the ruled. That fact is so obvious that it has always forced itself even upon the most casual observation, and so for the circulation of individuals between the two strata’. 81. Mosca, Ruling Class, 50–1 (emphasis added). 82. Mosca, Ruling Class, 50. 83. Mosca, Ruling Class, 51. 84. See Pakulski, ‘Weberian Foundations’, 49–51. See also Sandro Segre, ‘Weber’s, Mosca’s and Pareto’s Stratification Theories: A Comparative Analysis’, Revue européenne des sciences sociales 22, 67 (1984), 127–37. where it is explained that ‘The ruling class may … be subdivided into a multiplicity of graded subclasses … Thus the ruling class as a whole becomes a hierarchy of ruling subclasses’.85 Here, then, by asserting as his ‘first law of politics’ the basic thesis of classical elite theory, Collingwood has not followed Hobbes, but has instead adopted something very close to Mosca’s implicit correction of Hobbes. 4.2 Organization, force, and authority For Collingwood, the ruling class can only rule because it is organized. It is a society, possessing social consciousness and ‘joint will’.86 (He also uses the term ‘corporate will’.)87 Relations between its members are ‘civil’—that is, based upon mutual and self-respect and agreement.88 Political rule therefore ‘is exercised by authority of the society’.89 The ruled, on the other hand, are those who have not awoken to ‘consciousness of their own and each other’s freedom’,90 and who are therefore not sufficiently able to will jointly. This is why it is always also necessary to some degree to rule by ‘force’91—not physical force, but ‘force’ as superior moral or mental strength.92 Thus, for Collingwood, the ruling class rules by authority and force simultaneously,93 and can do so only because it is socially organized. These terms, ‘force’ and ‘authority’, are somewhat Hobbesian,94 even if the distinction itself is not. But we can find the same distinction made by Weber, who distinguishes domination by ‘control’ from domination by ‘authority’,95 and in Pareto, who distinguishes between ‘lion’ elites that rule by ‘force’, and ‘fox’ elites that use ‘cunning’.96 Pareto is obviously drawing on Machiavelli’s political methods and animal imagery. But unlike Collingwood, he also divides ‘force’ and ‘cunning’ between two essential types of elite that, as he understands it, attain power alternately in any history of successive revolutions. An elite that rules by ‘force’ is replaced by a new elite that operates by ‘cunning’, Pareto thinks, but as the people grow tired of political ‘cunning’, they again become attracted to a more ‘forceful’ elite, which attains power with the help of popular support. It has been noticed however that, for all this, Pareto’s Mind and Society does not contain the observation that political elites are cohesively organized, that they have a ‘group’ character, and that, because of this lacuna, Pareto cannot really explain how it is that elites get their way.97 85. Collingwood, New Leviathan, 25.46–9. 86. Collingwood, New Leviathan, ch. 21, 148–59. 87. Collingwood, New Leviathan, 35.22. 88. Collingwood, New Leviathan, 35.41–4. 89. Collingwood, New Leviathan, 20.48, 20.5–51. 90. Collingwood, New Leviathan, 21.51. 91. Collingwood, New Leviathan, 27.1. 92. Collingwood, New Leviathan, 20.48, 20.5–51. 93. Collingwood, New Leviathan, 20.45–20.5. 94. See Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan [1651], ed. J. C. A. Gaskin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 107 (16:4). See also Collingwood, New Leviathan, 20.46. 95. Pakulski, ‘Weberian Foundations’, 42. 96. Pareto, Mind and Society, ch. 12. 97. Ferdinand Kolegar, ‘The Elite and the Ruling Class: Pareto and Mosca Re-Examined’, The Review of Politics 29, 3 (Jul. 1967), 354–69, 357. Mosca however, like Collingwood, recognizes that being able to ‘act in concert’98 is the ruling class’s great political advantage: ‘A hundred men acting uniformly in concert, with a common understanding’, he explains, ‘will triumph over a thousand men who are not in accord’.99 More strikingly, he also observes, like Collingwood, that ‘Any political organization is both voluntary and coercive at one and the same time’.100 The terminological difference here—‘coercion’ instead of ‘force’, volition instead of ‘authority’—should not distract us from the shared recognition that voluntary and coercive organization are not mutually exclusive, and in fact operate simultaneously. There is always some degree of consent in any political organization, Mosca points out, and the amount of consent depends upon the extent to which the ruled class ‘believes in the political formula by which the ruling class justifies its rule’.101 But there are also always those who do not consent, or cannot yet consent, but who are nevertheless coerced by nature and necessity into political organization, ‘the human being finding himself unable to live otherwise’.102 4.3 Democracy and replenishment Of course for Collingwood, as we have seen, the aim should not be to rule the non-social community by force for its own sake, but rather to individually ‘civilize’ its members, so that they can be recruited into the ruling class, thereby replenishing and strengthening it. For Pareto too the governing elite is ‘restored’ when it loses ‘its more degenerate members’ and when ‘vigorous’ families rise from the lower classes.103 The governing elite is therefore ‘always in a state of slow and continuous transformation’104—though the ‘velocity in circulation has to be considered not only absolutely but also in relation to the supply of and the demand for certain social elements’.105 As for Collingwood, there is an optimum velocity, which is determined not absolutely, but relative to timely requirements. Collingwood does not use Pareto’s term ‘circulation’,106 and neither does he explain the continuous transformation of the ruling class in terms of rising ‘families’. His explanation of what opens access to the ruling class, ‘rule-worthiness’, is also more prosaic than Pareto’s: it is not ‘vigour’, but competence and willingness to do the required work that is, or should be, the criterion of recruitment into the ruling class.107 Collingwood’s version is, again, much closer to that of Mosca, who describes the ruling class being ‘renovated’ or ‘restocked’108 when ‘individual energies’ and ‘certain individuals … force their way from the bottom of the social ladder to the topmost rungs’.109 The relevant 98. Mosca, Ruling Class, 53. 99. Mosca, Ruling Class, 53: for some of Mosca’s concrete examples see 146–7. 100. Mosca, Ruling Class, 96. 101. Mosca, Ruling Class, 97. 102. Mosca, Ruling Class, 96. 103. Pareto, Mind and Society, 2054. 104. Pareto, Mind and Society, 2056. 105. Pareto, Mind and Society, 2055. 106. Pareto, Mind and Society, 2025. 107. Collingwood, New Leviathan, 26.28. 108. Mosca, Ruling Class, 68. 109. Mosca, Ruling Class, 67. criterion for recruitment into the ruling class ‘will be different according as the system is autocratic or liberal, or as the democratic or aristocratic tendency prevails’.110 But, as for Collingwood (and again contrary to Pareto), it is nothing so romantic as ‘vigour’ that opens access to the ruling class: it is ‘talents’ and ‘personal merit’.111 Ruling classes are ‘continually replenished through the admission of new elements who have inborn talents for leadership and a will to lead, and so prevents that exhaustion of aristocracies of birth which usually paves the way for great social cataclysms’.112 It is a process, he later adds, that is ‘indispensable to what is called “progress”’.113 Like Collingwood, Mosca posits two ‘tendencies’ that prevail alternately in the renovation process. His phrasing is in fact rather exquisite: the history of civilized mankind, he writes, has witnessed ‘an unending ferment of endosmosis and exosmosis between the upper classes and certain portions of the lower’.114 For the first tendency, ‘which aims to replenish the ruling class with elements deriving from the lower classes’,115 Mosca considers the term ‘liberal’, before explaining why, in his view, ‘the term ‘democratic’ seems more suitable’.116 ‘Democracy’ is the tendency which ‘results in a more or less rapid renovation of ruling classes’.117 Collingwood, as we have seen, uses ‘democracy’ in exactly the same way. 4.4 Aristocracy and class isolation Also like Collingwood, Mosca identifies ‘aristocracy’ as what ‘we would call the opposite tendency’, which, when it prevails, ‘produces closed, stationary, crystallized ruling classes’.118 What Collingwood shares with Mosca on this point is also what differentiates his dialectic from that of de Ruggiero. More so than de Ruggiero, Mosca and Collingwood are implicitly dismantling the Aristotelean classification of constitutions—monarchies, aristocracies, democracies. (By radically ‘updating’ Aristotle, Collingwood, as no doubt he realized, is also following Hobbes.)119 But in his redeployment of Aristotelian constitutional terminology, and especially in his recognition that democracy and aristocracy are the two essential ‘tendencies’ and that they are not mutually exclusive, Collingwood is again much closer to Mosca. ‘What Aristotle called a democracy’, Mosca observes, ‘was simply an aristocracy of fairly broad membership’, and although ‘the doctrine of popular sovereignty still holds sway over many minds’, nevertheless ‘modern scholarship is making it increasingly clear that democratic, monarchical and aristocratic principles function side by side in every political organism’.120 110. Mosca, Ruling Class, 402. 111. Mosca, Ruling Class, 406. 112. Mosca, Ruling Class, 416. 113. Mosca, Ruling Class, 415. 114. Mosca, Ruling Class, 65. 115. Mosca, Ruling Class, 395. 116. Mosca, Ruling Class, 395 (emphasis added). 117. Mosca, Ruling Class, 66 (emphasis added). 118. Mosca, Ruling Class, 66. 119. See Hobbes, Leviathan, 123–5 (19:1–4). 120. Mosca, Ruling Class, 52. For another Italian instance of the idea that democracy and aristocracy are not incompatible, see Benedetto Croce, Philosophy of the Practical: Economic and Ethic (New York: Biblo and Tannen, 1967), 135. For Collingwood, as we have seen, the principle of aristocracy is to slow the rate of recruitment when it threatens to go too fast. But still, if the rate of recruitment/percolation were allowed to fall below the ‘optimum velocity’—that is, if aristocracy were to become too strong—‘the whole political life of the country would suffer’.121 Collingwood does not really specify the exact effects of a suboptimal velocity of recruitment. The reader is left to elaborate or piece this together for himself. Pareto however describes the dangers of a ‘slowing-down of class-circulation’ in more detail. He explains that ‘decadent elements’ accumulate in the higher classes,122 while ‘superior elements’ build up in the lower classes.123 Such a ‘disturbance in the equilibrium’ is likely to produce a revolt, during which a new elite, made up of more vigorous ‘leaders from the higher strata’, tactically uses the ‘combative’ attitude of the lower strata to overthrow the incumbent elite.124 This is why, as Pareto’s celebrated remark has it, ‘History is a graveyard of aristocracies.’125 The essence of ‘aristocracy’ according to Mosca is, however, notably different—and here we can see that Collingwood is not simply accommodating his account wholesale either. Aristocracy for Mosca means the tendency ‘to stabilize social control and political power in the descendants of the class that happens to hold possession of it at the given historical moment’.126 Accordingly, Mosca’s version of the democratic–aristocratic dialectic is slightly different from Collingwood’s. It is ‘a conflict between the tendency of dominant elements to monopolize political power and transmit possession of it by inheritance, and the tendency towards a dislocation of old forces and an insurgence of new forces’.127 Thus, when the aristocratic tendency exerts too much influence, a ‘group spirit, a sense of caste, arises and asserts itself, so that the members of the aristocracy come to think of themselves as infinitely superior to the rest of men’.128 ‘Class isolation’ begins to set in,129 and this prevents the rulers from ‘understanding, and therefore from sympathizing with, the sorrows and tribulations of those who live on the lower rungs of the social ladder; and they are equally insensitive to the toils and efforts of those who have managed to climb a rung or two by their own achievement’.130 Further, because the rulers avoid contact with ‘the lower strata of society’, they ‘are left in complete ignorance of real psychological conditions in the lower classes’, with the overall result of ‘depriving the ruling classes of any influence whatever on mental and sentimental developments in the masses, and so of unfitting the ruling classes for managing them’.131 Collingwood does not understand aristocracy as a specifically hereditary or nepotistic principle of bestowing power. Neither does he include Mosca’s specific prognosis of ‘class isolation’ in his discussion of aristocracy. But Mosca’s account is very easily accommodated by 121. Collingwood, New Leviathan, 27.81. 122. Pareto, Mind and Society, 2057. 123. Pareto, Mind and Society, 2055. 124. Pareto, Mind and Society, 2053. 125. Pareto, Mind and Society, 2053. 126. Mosca, Ruling Class, 395. 127. Mosca, Ruling Class, 65. 128. Mosca, Ruling Class, 419–20. 129. See Mosca, Ruling Class, 116–19. 130. Mosca, Ruling Class, 420. 131. Mosca, Ruling Class, 420 (emphasis added). Collingwood’s ‘third law of politics’, according to which ‘there is a correspondence between the ruler and the ruled, whereby the former become adapted to ruling these as distinct from other persons, and the latter to being ruled by these as distinct from other persons.’132 In Collingwood’s terms, what Mosca describes would be an example of the breakdown of this law. The danger of the rate of recruitment dropping below the optimum velocity, then, may be that the third law of politics ceases to apply: the correspondence between rulers and ruled is eroded, as the ruling class, perhaps in much the same way that Mosca describes, begins habitually to resist infiltration from members of the non-social community, who are now understood to be essentially different from themselves—or, rather, misunderstood. Finally, in building into his third law of politics the acknowledgement that the law of adaptation works both ways, Collingwood is again in agreement with Mosca. The second of Mosca’s widespread ‘habits’ of political analysis that, he thinks, obscure the truth about the ruling class, is the myth of de facto popular sovereignty. Mosca explains that ‘pressures arising from the discontent of the masses who are governed … exert a certain amount of influence on the policies of the ruling, the political, class.’133 But it does not follow, he adds, that the ostensibly ‘ruling’ minority is therefore actually ruled by the subject majority—specifically, by the threat of its discontent and revolution. Instead, ‘granting that the discontent of the masses might succeed in deposing a ruling class, inevitably … there would have to be another organized minority within the masses themselves to discharge the functions of a ruling class.’134 Collingwood offers a concrete example of precisely this. The ‘citoyens’ upon whom the French Revolution aimed to bestow power, Collingwood observes, were not the whole population, not a ‘rabble’, but the bourgeoisie, and ‘the bourgeoisie was already an organized body corporately possessed of economic power’. ‘The problem of the revolutionaries’, Collingwood concludes, ‘was to bestow political power where economic power already lay.’135 As for Mosca, then, the habit of paying attention to the majority in a political movement blinds analysists and historians to the consistent applicability of the first law of politics: there is always, even in instances of popular revolt, an organized minority that is already in control. 5. CONCLUSIONS This essay has sought to complement Robin Douglass’s study of what I have called Collingwood’s ‘first’ political dialectic between non-sociality and sociality, by providing an equivalent study of the ‘second’, and thereby to throw some light on what has been hitherto an overshadowed corner of Collingwood’s political thought. This second dialectic is between a principle of democracy, and a principle of aristocracy, which operate together to regulate the percolation of liberty by way of recruitment into the ‘ruling class’, and which in England has traditionally been embedded in the Liberal and Conservative parties. Although Collingwood is drawing on a long-recognized dialectic between something like innovation and conservation— an echo of which can be found in de Ruggiero’s History of European Liberalism—Collingwood’s revision, accommodating a particular theory of what the ruling class is, how it rules, how it replenishes itself, and how it can weaken, brings him into close correspondence with the chief themes of classical elite theory as it was developed in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, in major texts that happened to become available to English readers shortly before Collingwood began work on his great achievement of political theory, The New Leviathan. It has 132. Collingwood, New Leviathan, 25.9. 133. Mosca, Ruling Class, 50. 134. Mosca, Ruling Class, 51 (emphasis added). 135. Collingwood, New Leviathan, 25.91–92. not been claimed that Collingwood was influenced by these texts, that he is responding to them, or even that he must have read them—though some circumstantial connections have been noted. Readers will of course arrive at their own preliminary judgements. It seems to me that, if and when Collingwood does draw on old and new ideas from his wide reading for his own purposes, he never does so without substantially remodelling them first. University of Hull ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The first half of this study was presented at the ‘Visions of Politics: British Idealism and New Liberalism’ conference hosted by the University of Genoa in March 2018. Thanks are due to James Connelly, Colin Tyler, and David Boucher for comments on that draft, and especially to Patricia Chiantera for first bringing to my attention possible connections between Collingwood and Mosca.